Choosing a Platform
Bringing in new technology is as much about strategy as it is solving a problem. Depending on where the technology fits in the fabric of your organisation, you could be unknowingly making a long-term commitment to a product. Make the wrong choice, and you could find yourself applying emergency bandages to new wounds that erupt all over the surface of what was supposed to be the solution.
Knowing that doesn't make the process any easier. Even supposing you've figured out what the solution to the problem should look like. As a law firm, your situation is further complicated by the nature of the work you do, the data you hold, and the expectations of the clients who want to understand how their money is contributing to their quality of service.
To help facilitate the conversation before you make that leap, we've listed some of the top considerations that are often overlooked.
Something old, something new (something borrowed?)
When we're faced with a difficult problem, it's common for us to think that we are the only ones to have ever faced such a challenge. So unique to our organisation, so complex in its nuances: there's nothing for it, we must pioneer our own solution!
Except that might not be the best option for your team, your budget, or your timeline.
For most, the simple option is often the better one.
The first thing to ask yourself is whether you already have the tools in-house. It can be easy to lose track of what is being used in your organisation, especially if your organisation is big, and there may even be tools that were approved by procurement that just haven't been implemented yet: this might be just the problem for those tools. Take stock of what's available, have a talk with your IT teams, and map out what's available. And be flexible with your thinking. In today's platform wars, a lot of products double-up to solve many problems. Many video-chat platforms also have facilities for remote-whiteboarding. Many task planning tools can be used for macro-strategising. Many emailing services have instant chat. And so on. The best solutions can be creative re-purposing of what you already have to hand. These tools have the added benefit of already being approved and integrated into your organisation.
The next thing to consider is whether there's an off-the-shelf product you could use. No development costs, reviews from long term users, improvements from feedback across many customers, maintenance and updates provided as standard. These benefits can lighten the burden on your own team.
Platform proliferation
Something you might want to consider is how that tool will fit amongst the technology you already use. Like too much anaesthetic in one spot making your gums hurt, piling on too many different solutions can actually make the problem worse.
Consider a problem with communication. Perhaps you decide you want to bring in a new chat application for instant messaging across teams. But what if that tool also has file storage and sharing, where you already have a file sharing platform used across the organisation? Now people are forgetting where they put files or storing different versions in different places, and no-one knows which contains the latest revisions. And what if only your team has access to that chat application? Now it's more burdensome for your team to communicate with other teams across the organisation, so they do that even less than they did before.
Sometimes the best technology isn't the one that solves your problem the best, but the technology that plays nicely with the other technologies you've brought in.
The allure of the shiny
Ours is an age of start-ups. There are apps, platforms, and services galore at our disposal - and a lot of them set up to perfectly target the niche problems across industries that will allow these start-ups to snatch ground from major companies. From the out-set, this seems ideal. And there will certainly be solutions you might require that you can only get from these focused companies. But there are things to consider before you jump in feet first.
Start-ups are, by definition, are not very mature organisations. You need to ascertain how mature. It's not impossible to begin a procurement process from the promises of a good website, only to find out that your company would be close to Customer Zero and actually they're not quite there yet with what they want to achieve but it's definitely something they want to provide. Another thing to consider is the long-term plans of the founders. If your integration process is lengthy, and this new product will result in an overhaul of your organisations internal structures, what you don't want is for that product to be deprecated (or for the company to vanish altogether). It's not uncommon for start-ups to aspire to being bought out by bigger companies, posing themselves as a threat to market share to tempt them. Sometimes the original team is folded into the bigger company and sometimes the product is just rebranded, but just as often the whole project vanishes into the ether. The only evidence it existed being the pay-outs in the founders' pockets. If you need the product to stick around in the long-term, be certain that the company intends for that too. Or at least that you have contingency plans for if it doesn’t.
You also have to match client expectations. If the product is in any way external facing, or changes how you work with the clients or their data, you might want to be sure that they aren't going to be scared away by something they consider to be a 'risky bet'. Unfortunately, technology isn't always glamorous. Sometimes it's using legacy systems from ten years ago because that's the kind of dependable service you need to guarantee your clients.
Security
This should always be a priority when you're onboarding any new technology. As with any organisation, you've got the protection of your employees and assets to consider. As a law firm, you've got the requirements and expectations of clients as well as a duty of care. As technology adopts new approaches, from cloud computing to blockchain, new attack surfaces are born. What is good practice for an organisation that keeps all contracts analogue and has firewalls mounted around every email server, is not good practice for organisations that download all their contracts from a cloud provider. When you bring in new technologies, it's not just new ways of working for your employees that you're introducing. It's new ways of working for the threat actors that want to attack your organisation.
Even with your own security policies tightened up to account for these changes, you also need to be aware of the delineations of responsibility between you and any third-party providers. If you're introducing cloud computing, who is responsible for setting the security policies on those servers? Who is responsible for the protection of that data? Does your third-party provider make any guarantees of that data? Do they make any guarantees of access to that data? Who looks after the keys that encrypt that data? These should be conversations you're having before you sign the dotted line - and certainly long before you upload confidential information.
In the end
The process of technology procurement can be long and arduous. It may seem counter-intuitive, but you save time when you are more conscientious. By asking these questions upfront and planning for the long term, you spare yourself from unpicking complicated technology knots later down the line.
Remember to:
· Take stock of what tools you already have and see whether any can be repurposed or extended
· Identify where any new technology would fit within your organisation and your existing workflows to make sure you won’t be causing any unforeseen disruptions
· Thoroughly investigate any vendors you want to onboard (and their supply chain)
· Be clear on the security requirements of your organisation, and the expectations you have of third-party vendors
· Consider your clients and their requirements and expectations
At the very least, your solutions should aim to not introduce new problems.